The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield, Revisited

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Anna Stubblefield in October 2015.CreditCreditJonno Rattman for The New York Times

By Daniel Engber

April 5, 2018

On a recent Monday in a crowded Newark courthouse, the former Rutgers philosophy professor Anna Stubblefield admitted she touched the penis of a man with cerebral palsy who could not legally consent. In an earlier trial, which I wrote about for The Times Magazine in October 2015, Anna was convicted on two counts of raping the same victim; last summer, that verdict was overturned on appeal. Her guilty plea has now forestalled a second trial, and barring some surprise at the sentencing in early May, she will receive no further time in prison beyond the nearly 22 months she has already served. It seems that this long, complicated story has come to a demoralizing end.

At the prompting of her lawyer, Anna told the judge that she had intentionally touched the victim’s “intimate parts for the purposes of mutual sexual gratification.” Her guilty plea acknowledged little that was substantive about the case: It did not stipulate, for example, that Anna’s adulterous affair with “D.J.,” a nonverbal man who has been diagnosed with profound physical and mental disabilities, might have been founded on a suspect premise: that he was able to communicate by using a keyboard with her help. It did not concede that D.J. lacks the mental powers of a normal, 37-year-old adult, or that Anna could have been the unwitting author of his typed-out messages, through a sort of Ouija-board effect. It did not walk back the implication that D.J. had in some way played the part of the seducer. Rather, Anna copped only to a narrow, legalistic proposition: that she “should have known that the victim had been determined to be ‘mentally defective’ to the point of being incapable of providing consent.”

In other words, she found a way to cut her losses in the courtroom without denying D.J.’s competence or admitting any doubts about the realness of their love. This was to be expected, I suppose. From my position in the gallery, reporting on the trial, it always seemed to me that Anna was entrapped by the grandiosity of her good intentions. As an academic, she devoted much of her career to social-justice activism and the philosophy of race and disability, warning in her published work that men like D.J. (who is black) were like “the canary’s canary” in the coal mine — “the most vulnerable of the vulnerable” — and subject to both white supremacist and ableist oppression. In teaching D.J. how to type, using a widely disavowed method known as “facilitated communication,” she believed she was restoring his right of self-determination: empowering him to take college classes, present papers at conferences and eventually express his longing for the older, married, white woman who had been his savior.

I sensed there was no escaping from this narrative. Spending all those hours next to D.J. at the keyboard, Anna had written both of them into a romance: the activist professor who sacrificed her family, career and eventually her freedom; and her lover, who now would be remanded to a prison cell of silence as a result of their affair, his inner life discounted and ignored. With each step she took in their relationship, it was as if she sank a little deeper into a quicksand of delusion, a kind of erotomania. If she reneged on any claims she had made about D.J.’s intellect, and his capacity to give consent, she would be admitting not only to what might be criminal behavior but also to the idea that she had become a vector of white, able-bodied supremacy — that she was the boogeyman she had sworn to fight.

Which is why Anna’s guilty plea left me discombobulated. It made sense strategically, of course, yet I had still imagined she would go to trial for a second time and renew the fight to prove that D.J. has a voice. I figured that she’d never walk away, however rational it might be to do so, if that meant D.J. would be left behind. Had Anna fallen out of love with D.J., and with her role as the tragic hero in his life? I hoped she might explain, as she left the courthouse building. “Do you believe that D.J. is ‘mentally incompetent’?” I asked.

Her eyebrows knitted for a moment, but she didn’t give an answer.

“We have no comment,” her lawyer said.

It occurred to me, after she was gone, that over the four years I’ve spent covering her case, this was the first time I’d spoken to her directly. For my feature story in The Times, I interviewed Anna’s mother, father, daughter, brother, colleagues and friends. I even chatted with some people whom she’d acted with in high-school plays. My inferences of her character were secondhand. (Perhaps that’s why I found her guilty plea surprising.) The same was true for D.J. and his family: His mother and his brother had not agreed to speak with me on the record, in deference to the legal process and to protect D.J.’s privacy.

In a way, I had re-enacted Anna’s speaking on behalf of D.J., and something in my article seemed to bring about the same impulse — a desire to re-enact my re-enactment — in many others, too. After it was published, I watched as waves of storytellers colonized and feasted on the details of the case. I heard from dramaturges and poets; documentary filmmakers; experimental videographers; a composer who wished to stage the trial as an opera. A French film producer emailed to say that Isabelle Huppert “would be perfect in the role” of Anna, and that the story has “everything we are looking for … love, desire, manipulation and mystery.” (That proved to be a common thread: When people got in touch, they’d often tell me, “The thing is, Dan, it’s a lovestory…”)

Another round of reinterpreters would draw from Anna’s former colleagues in disability studies and philosophy. A rash of academic papers offered theory-laden tellings of the facts, with titles like “Ableism, Ambiguity and the Anna Stubblefield Case” and “Ableist Shame and Disruptive Bodies.” Some painted Anna as a modern-day Anne Sullivan — a protector of nonverbal people and a champion of their human rights. Others saw her as a reckless, exploitative threat to the very community she meant to help.

Scholars of legal ethics, meanwhile, parsed the moral implications of her actions. If Anna really was mistaken in her belief that D.J. had given his consent, then what degree of punishment would fit the crime? In an Op-Ed article written for The Times, Peter Singer of Princeton University and Jeff McMahan of the University of Oxford argued that her original, 12-year sentence was grossly unfair because her sex with D.J. was likely well-intentioned and may not have caused much harm. “If Stubblefield wronged or harmed him,” they wrote, “it must have been in a way that he is incapable of understanding and that affected his experience only pleasurably.” Rejoinders from their fellowacademics followed.

Rereadings and rewritings extended to the legal process, too. An appellate court heard arguments in April 2017 and looked at all the transcripts of Anna’s original trial, then last summer overturned the verdict on the grounds that Anna was not given a fair chance to defend herself. That decision hinged on (but did not resolve) some subtle questions of the law: Had the trial judge been right to bar almost all references to facilitated communication from the courtroom? Was there any clear, coherent definition of that method to begin with? Might a different treatment of the evidence have yielded a better, truer set of findings?

In the end, the only one who never got to give his own interpretation of the story was the person at its heart. D.J.’s silence set this whirlwind into motion, sucking in proxy voices to fill the void. Even D.J.’s brother and his mother, the ones who would seem to know him best, and love him more than anyone — and who are literally empowered by the state to speak on his behalf — have been sidelined in this storytelling process.

“We didn’t want to get to a point where we’re in a courtroom and having to go through all this,” D.J.’s brother said in 2015. “We didn’t want [D.J.]’s initials to be in the newspapers, to see these bloggers making godawful comments.” He continued: “We were quite content with moving on with our lives.” Yet their interests have been spoken for by others all along: First by Rutgers University, which referred the case to law enforcement when the family was only seeking to be left alone; then by the Essex County prosecutor’s office, which arranged a sting on Anna, coaching D.J.’s mother on exactly what to say to her in a recorded conversation; then by me in The Times, where I reported on the “strange” case more as it pertained to Anna than to the victim and his family; and now by the legal system one last time, which has been willing to accept Anna’s sorry-not-that-sorry plea in spite of the family’s objections.

“Look at him, he can’t consent,” D.J.’s mother told me when last week’s hearing ended. D.J., who was present with his brother and his brother’s pregnant wife, is roughly five feet tall, and he is mostly quiet but for grunts and chirps. “You call that justice?” she continued. “Print this in The New York Times. Tell them what the mother said: A white woman did this to my son.”

She didn’t have to spell it out; the racial context for the plea was clear enough. If the roles had been reversed — if the victim had been a small, white woman in a diaper who could not speak or dress herself, and if the defendant had been a black man in a position of authority — would things have ended this way? I thought back to D.J.’s brother’s testimony from the original trial. He said that when Anna introduced the family to facilitated communication, he noticed that the folks who used this method were almost always white. (I observed this fact as well, when I visited a facilitated-communication conference in Syracuse.) He was proud, he said, that his brother “was the Jackie Robinson of F.C.”

Later, he would suggest that Anna, in taking ownership of D.J.’s voice, had tried to strip him of his black identity — to supplant “a life steeped in the history and culture of his God-fearing, Southern-rooted, African-American family with some version of life she thought was better.”

Now D.J.’s family watched as the wheels of justice were thrown into reverse. Anna’s original conviction has been erased; the judge who sentenced her to serve a dozen years in prison, and denounced her as “the perfect example of a predator preying on their prey,” was reassigned from the case; and the prosecutor’s office agreed to let her go with time served. (D.J.’s family was awarded a $4 million judgment in a civil suit, but Anna does not appear to have the means to pay it.)

“On behalf of my brother, who is nonverbal, I want to say, ‘Me, too,’ ” D.J.’s brother told me in the courthouse hallway. “This was not merely touching for ‘mutual pleasure.’ This was rape. She raped him two times. She did godawful things with him, and I believe the punishment is woefully inadequate.” People with disabilities are at much greater risk than able-bodied people of being sexually abused, he added, and the fact that Anna should receive the “gift” of this plea deal was “a slap in the face” to that community as well.

I scribbled his words into my notebook, hoping I would get them right in print. And then, as he finished up his speech, a middle-aged white woman approached and handed him her business card. She teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and she is working on an adaptation of the story for the stage. “I would like to write something about the case,” she told him.

He nodded, put her card into his pocket and walked away. He has no plans to follow up.

Daniel Engber is a frequent contributor to the magazine. He last wrote about snakes as lab rats.

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